PRAYER OF SUPPLICATION AND INTERCESSION  

 

ALMIGHTY GOD,

Our world is a world of fences. Some of these divisions are good, and they facilitate the flourishing of life.

We pray that You raise a pillar and keep us from harm; protect us from those who would wish evil upon us.

For the men and women who continue to serve in places of conflict, we pray You set a hedge of safety around them. May You mark out territories of peace in lands of war.

For those who are invaded by disease and sickness, we pray for a shield, a strong wall to block the ill spirits from their bodies and minds.

For those who have been flooded with economic hardship, we pray for a dam to quell both the accumulating debt and the growing anxiety and desperation.

For those who have been familiar with death, may You keep their grief free of despair, and their tears clean of bitterness.

God, our world is a world of fences. And some of these divisions strangle life and prevent it from flourishing.

We pray that upon places where hate erects its high battlements, You will bring your strong arm.

We pray for the courage to uproot, post by post, the fences weíve built of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, abilityÖ.

For those around whom an enclosure of callousness and indifference has been built up, we pray that Your compassion may be a dissolving force.

For those who feel that some unseen screen surrounds them--keeping others from getting close to them and keeping them from others--God, we pray that You will tear it up and extract them from their loneliness.

Almighty God, we put our trust in Your love, a love that has even dismantled the boundary between You and us, a love that has entered into our own world as one of us.

May You grant us the courage to climb out of ourselves and come closer to embodying this love. May we begin by praying the words Christ taught us to prayÖ.Amen.

 

February 8 , 2009

Jake Willard-Crist

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